Political Alienation, Generalized Trust and Perceptions of Immigration. A Multi-Level Assessment

Understanding the sources of people’s attitudes towards immigrants and immigration has become increasingly important, as the number of immigrants is growing in many European countries. We expect the degree of citizens’ political alienation to be a significant variable, with a higher degree of alienation correlating with more negative perception of immigration. However, research shows that there are circumstances under which the effects of negative factors associated with immigration-attitudes may be softened (Herreros & Criado 2007). Our central starting point is that generalized trust is a feature that does this and, consequently, the research question is does the increasing effect of political alienation on perceptions of threat by immigration hold after controlling for generalized trust both at the individual and regional level? We test a number of hypotheses that both directly and indirectly connect three central variables, namely political alienation, perceptions of threat by immigration and generalized trust. We do so by applying a multi-level setting, which allows us to evaluate the relationships at both the individual and the aggregated (regional) level. Our individual-level data from the European Social Survey (2014) are completed with contextual-level data from Eurostat. Our initial findings indicate, that generalized trust does indeed soften the negative effects of political alienation and result in lower threat perceptions. Moreover, regional-level generalized trust has direct effects both on political alienation and perceptions of threat, but it also modifies the relationship between them so that the effect of political alienation on perceptions of threat by immigration is smaller in contexts of high (regional) trust.